So I just had my first big assignment, and man, grad school is weird - I finished the thing, and if I'd had time, I would have scrapped everything and started all over. It's not that I hate what I wrote, it's just that I'm much better qualified to write the thing now that I've already written it.
So the piece was about misogyny in the comics community, a subject I've got a hard time getting my brain around because first, I've personally never once felt anything but embraced by the geek community. And second, most of us geeks have been bullied and excluded for being weird; we should damn well have some empathy.
One of the most mind-boggling things i found in my research was all the men, including writers and industry insiders, bitching about female cosplayers. I read this CNN article where some wanker called Joe Peacock complained about fake geek women prancing around in sexy costumes to "satisfy their hollow egos." He's not objecting to real geek girls dressing sexy, he says, "I'm talking about an attention addict trying to satisfy her ego and feel pretty by infiltrating a community to seek the attention of guys she wouldn't give the time of day on the street."
This guy, and the many, many guys who agree with him, are so the center of their own universes that they believe that women who aren't interested in geek culture would spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars crafting a dreadfully uncomfortable costume, then pay to get into a con and be surrounded by men they don't like, all for some attention. Even the picture that accompanies Peacock's article demonstrates his complete lack of logic. The woman on the right dressed as a gender swapped Loki? Check out her helmet. Loki's horned helmet was clearly designed with a total disregard for physics - it's way too front-heavy to exist in real life. I literally don't know how that woman is keeping that thing on her head. But I can tell you this - no woman makes or buys a two-foot tall migraine-inducing, physics-defying big ass helmet just to get some attention from dudes they're not actually interested in.Peacock refers to these supposed fake geek girls as "6 of 9s" - in the real world they'd be sixes, but at cons they seem like nines. Here's the thing, Cock. Do you mind if I call you Cock? You don't need a multi-hundred dollar costume to get male attention. You just need to put on a short skirt and walk into a bar. If you think the ladies in your picture are sixes, then you'd probably consider me a three on my best day. And I have never wanted for male attention. The attention might not come from the kind of men from whom I'd ever want attention (once when I was 15 some old guy told me that if I came to his house he'd let me drink wine as long as I promised not to tell my mother), but Cock says himself that these fake geek girls don't actually want to date convention geeks. According to him, they're just dressing sexy to satisfy their hollow egos. (In related news, what the holy hell does "hollow ego" even mean?)
Anyway, it just depresses the crap out of me that some men in the community that has always shown me so much love have such a disdain for women that they complain bitterly, and at length, about being forced to be in the presence of attractive, scantily clad women. I just... I grew up believing that the end of racism and sexism were inexorable. I grew up believing that all the bigots I met were an endangered species bound for extinction, that society was now on the right track. And now geek women who speak their minds are victims of literal terror campaigns. A comics editor named Janelle Asselin wrote a review of a Teen Titans cover and pointed out that maybe having a teenage character with barely covered boobs the size of her head was inappropriate. And she was literally driven from her home by very graphic and specific rape threats. And now half the damn country is rallying behind an openly bigoted misogynist because they're sick of "political correctness." Half the country. Half of the state I live in. Half of my neighbors and half of the people I meet each day and half of my coworkers. And a significant number of members of the community that taught me I wasn't alone, that women could be strong.
